There’s a lot of speculation on various blogs about Google’s acquisition of DocVerse, a startup founded by former Microsoft employees to enable co-authoring of MS Office documents. Most of the discussion has focused on the potential of Google integrating DocVerse into its apps portfolio, but given the chasm in terms of feature/functionality between Google Apps and Microsoft Office, it doesn’t seem that the idea of a MS Office and Google App user co-authoring a document is going to be feasible anytime soon.
Instead, is it possible that Google aims to position DocVerse as a hosted alternative to SharePoint for workgroup collaboratation, delivering a Wave-like functionality that integrates with Microsoft Office as a separate service from its Apps? The universe of Microsoft Office users is a massive order of magnitude larger than those using Google Apps, or who will use Google Apps in the next few years, so why not challenge Microsoft’s two big growth engines - SharePoint, and the forthcoming Office Live Workspace to provide a real-time collaboration capability compatible with Microsoft’s desktop suite?
Salesforce.com’s Chatter social computing service is now available to a limited number of private beta participants. Salesforce.com’s first shot across the social computing bow was fired back in November when they announced the service, now that the wraps are coming off we’ll see if Salesforce can compete against the likes of Microsoft, IBM, a plethora of emerging vendors, and even Cisco.
I think Chatter has the potential to be extremely disruptive. Salesforce brings some inherent strengths to the table, it’s arguably the most widely deployed software as a service, via the SaaS delivery model Salesforce can bundle Chatter with the services it’s already providing to end-user customers, in effect going around IT and undercutting more centralized attempts to bring social computing to the enterprise via stand-alone platforms such as Confluence, Jive, and SocialText, or as add-ons to collaboration tools such as SharePoint or the Notes/Domino/Quickr suite. Salesforce also points to the opportunity for its development partners to integrate Chatter into the tens of thousands of Force.Com developers, but to succeed Chatter must evolve beyond a Salesforce-based application and offer the opportunity to integrate into other collaboration applications. It must also overcome concerns related to compliance and security of storing potentially discoverable conversations in the cloud.
Google today announced “Buzz“, their attempt to merge the worlds of social computing with e-mail. Buzz adds social tracking features to your in-box, allowing you to see the social activity of your contacts. So what’s not to like?
I think the biggest issue with Buzz is its reliance on Gmail. Google makes the assumption that your e-mail contacts are your buddies, but that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve got a lot of folks in my in-box who are business or casual acquaintances, or whom are on mailing lists that I’m on, and who aren’t friends I’d want to follow. The people I want to follow are all in my Facebook account, but Google doesn’t yet connect to Facebook. If there’s a “killer app” that will move people from Facebook to Google, I don’t see it. Buzz may have some use as another social computing channel, but at this point I don’t see it replacing Facebook (or even LinkedIn).
Where Buzz, I think, has the greatest appeal is in creating a social community within companies using Gmail or Google apps as their corporate messaging environment. Buzz just fired a shot across the bow of all the social computing software or service vendors targeting SMBs. If you are already paying for a corporate Gmail service, you just got a whole suite of social tools as well.
There is one other problem, it doesn’t work. At this point I don’t see the “Buzz” link in my Gmail in-box, and from following various twitter comments, neither do many others.
Update: Buzz has a massive privacy flaw
IBM made a big splash today in advance of next week’s Lotusphere conference by announcing that Panasonic is abandoning its Exchange-based e-mail infrastructure for IBM’s LotusLive hosted e-mail offering. This news, coupled with recent wins by Google for its Apps and Gmail offerings may finally demonstrate that cloud-based collaboration services are starting to gain traction within the enterprise. It’s important to note in the IBM Lotus announcement that while iNotes is the initial hook, Lotus expects iNotes adoption to lead to deployment of cloud-based collaboration and social applications including Connections and Quickr as well as project management.
We’re starting to get a lot of questions from our enterprise clients about SaaS-based collaboration offerings. Key factors driving interest include potential for cost reduction, simplified infrastructure, and the ability to easily deploy a robust and reliable set of services across the globe. Key concerns limiting interest include the lack of customization, concern that customers will get a “lowest common denominator service” and concerns related to guaranteeing performance of Internet-based applications. I expect to spend a lot of time in 2010 following the rise of cloud-based collaboration.
Just a few short years ago it looked as though XMPP, the XML-based messaging protocol central to the Jabber IM platform, was fading away. Microsoft had committed to the SIP-derived SIMPLE (SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) for its Live Communications Server IM platform, while iBM Lotus incorporated SIMPLE as the basis for Sametime. The momentum behind unified communications around 2006 appeared to leave XMPP in the dust, as vendors rapidly looked to SIP and SIMPLE as the basis for integration of presence with rich-media applications such as voice and video. But then a funny thing happened….
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In case you missed it, Cisco took the wraps off its social/collaboration strategy yesterday at its Collaboration Summit (#ciscocollab) summit in San Francisco. Cisco fired a salvo deep into the territory of Microsoft and IBM Lotus (and to a lesser extent, Google) with its own suite of products covering messaging and social computing. Cisco also introduced numerous video and real-time collaboration products designed to broaden access to its telepresence suite, mate video with WebEx web conferencing, and easily enable inter-company collaboration.
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Jakob Nielsen, who has been writing about Web usability for about as long as the Web has existing, has posted some analysis of Intranet usability best practices around data organization and personalization. It’s worth a read: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/social-intranet-features.html
Cross-posted from CloudAve by Ben Kepes.
Gentry Underwood, the head of Knowledge sharing at design house IDEO claims that designing solutions that work requires finding the triggers that drive individual motivation. Designing simplicity and intuitiveness into the UI and building the solution to integrate into existing workflows.
The very structures we use to handle scale as organizations grow inhibit collaboration and knowledge sharing while the hierarchies inherent within organisations encourage silos. Many organizations that try to use technology to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration don’t see much ROI and a thought that is close to my heart, think about the people - it’s not just about the technology. In the past IDEO experimented with always-on video conferencing, called “wormholes”.
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Jason Rothbart is one of the founders of Groupswim, a SAS enterprise collaboration solution that debuted at last year’s Enterprise 2.0 as a finalist in the conference Launch Pad. I caught up with him recently, and explored his perspective on Web 2.0 tools adoption in the world of business.
- Jason’s title is VP of Customer Success, which I think says something important about the orientation of the company.
- Jason affirms a bimodal sales model: some clients are buying really quickly, because their “heads are on fire”, where in other cases acquisition is very, very slow because you need to get the CFO to sign off on any purchase.
- His insights on how tools virally spread through a company or top-down in enterprise-wide deals confirm what we have seen in other conversation.
- Jason points out that the there is a stake difference between clearcut returns — like increased sales — but other benefits are more nebulous: “But anyone who tells you that they can tell you exactly what the ROI is is either lying or doesn’t know what they are talking about.”
The interaction with Jason is a lot closer to the deal side of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, but that aspect of what is going on is just as revealing as the more academic and theoretical issues that seem to become foremost with practitioners.
Mar 8th, 2010 |
